Film Review: Mothering Sunday screening at Starlight Cinema Taupō now

Odessa Young and Eva Husson attend a Mothering Sunday special screening at Tribeca Screening Room in New York. Photo / Getty Images

Mothering Sunday (134 mins) In cinemas.
Directed by Eva Husson
Many talented people were involved in the making of Mothering Sunday.

Graham Swift wrote the novella of the same name, having won the Booker Prize for his novel Last Orders, which was made into a successful film. Alice Birch, the screenwriter, won several awards for her adaptation of another novella Lady Macbeth, winner of the Best British Feature Bafta in 2018.

A star-studded cast includes Colin Firth, Olivia Colman and Glenda Jackson, although their roles are disappointingly small. There's a suitably melancholic score by Morgan Kibby and outstanding cinematography by Jamie Ramsay, including wonderful extreme close-ups. Two-time Oscar-winning Sandy Powell's costumes are superb. Director Eva Husson had a dream team.

It's the 1920s, reminiscent of the times of the original Downton Abbey with the devastation caused by WWI in recent memory. We're familiar, from books and films, with the times: class divisions, classic cars, fabulous English country estates, women above and below stairs smoking cigarettes as a sign of their increasing independence. Eva Husson has captured all that beautifully and has also shown, poignantly, the underbelly of life for the privileged who have lost sons and heirs.

Beautiful Australian Odessa Young, with a perfect English accent, and effortlessly stylish Josh O'Connor (Prince Charles in The Crown) play doomed lovers: the maid Jane Fairchild and the sole surviving son of neighbouring landed gentry, Paul Sheringham.

Firth and Colman are bereaved parents, the Nivens, who employ Jane. Firth does his familiar inarticulate, emotionally bottled thing that speaks volumes about how he's really feeling. Colman's few lines are the best in the film. Glenda Jackson plays much older Jane, who abandoned life as a servant in favour of working in a bookshop, later becoming a successful writer.

On the downside, the film shows character development by shifting the action back and forward in time, the 1920s, 1940s, and 1990s, which will appeal to some viewers but not to others and Alice Birch's script occasionally stumbles.

Good acting makes up for any shortcomings in the script. Yearning, vulnerability, smouldering passion and deep sadness are all there, wordlessly.

There's a memorable erotic scene with Jane and Paul in Paul's bedroom while his parents are out for the day. He smuggles her in, their first chance to be together in his home. It's as languidly shot as the rest of the film but the same slow pace tends to annoy after Paul leaves, when Jane wanders around his empty house, naked, familiarising herself with the family's photographs of sons killed in the war, and their library. She doesn't seem to care, although the audience does, that a family member might come home unexpectedly. Great dramatic tension there, subtly done too.

The film's main achievement is to show the effects of the trauma of war on a small slice of upper-crust society, contrasting the beauty on the surface with the struggle beneath. Recommended.

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GIVEAWAY

The first person to bring an image or hardcopy of this review to Starlight Cinema Taupō qualifies for a free ticket to Mothering Sunday.